the Artist Kubra Khademi suffered from the patriarchal structures in Afghanistan even as a small child. “Political Bodies,” the new book about her art, shows one aspect of the Afghan power structure that is one of the hardest to bear: The structures are so cemented that the women can’t even scrape together the courage it would take to stand up for themselves to help each other. Khademi also had to be kept small by the women in her family. She was the “bad child” who constantly beat her mother because she drew secretly – a strictly forbidden misdeed. “I was the demon,” is how she drastically describes her role in the family. Having broken out of this hell, she now wants to do better, in other words: be brave and stick together with women. Through her paintings and performances, she has been trying to resist the violence in her homeland for many years.
For several years this resistance has been taking place from exile. After attracting public hatred in Kabul in 2015 with the performance “Armor”, Khademi fled to France. Khademi had walked the streets of the center of the capital wearing a metal suit that traced the shape of a woman’s body. The idea was that the armor should emphasize and protect the wearer’s femininity in equal measure. Khademi wanted to make such a public statement. She succeeded better than she intended: the male reactions were so aggressively threatening that the action had to be stopped after a few minutes.
In the new publication of the Munich Hirmer Verlag French art critic Philipp Dagen has his say, who is shocked at how young many of the men in the video recordings of the performance “Armor” are who become abusive on the street. A sad omen: a new generation of the Taliban, who had regained strength, was maturing. The takeover of power almost exactly a year ago is the sobering proof. It’s nice that a publisher, despite the many problems, finds the time to deal with the exciting work of an artist who wants to help there, where everything is much worse than here. Incidentally, an exhibition by the artist in Munich would also be nice. The “clarity, always paired with strong will and anger”, which the Pakistani artist Huma Mulji attests to Khademi’s person and work, would certainly be felt even more impressively in front of the works themselves.